I Stole This Idea

It's true, and I stole it from the always wonderful Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter.

See, yesterday Tom put up an article called Ten Comics, Ten Memories, and I think it's absolutely brilliant, so I'm hoping he won't mind if I step on his toes for a brief second or two.

I don't think I can come up with ten, but I'm going to try:

X-Force #8

While the cover leaves much to be desired, it's the inside art that probably hooked me more than anything. Most of it is done by Mike Mignola, who was then unknown to me, and the work inside holds up suprisingly well, better than a Rob Liefeld plotted comic book deserves at any rate. As any longtime reader can tell you this was my first comic. Certainly not the first one I ever read (likely a Spider-Man or Batman book), but this is the one that got me where I am today. I bought this at a Wal-Mart in Phenix City, Alabama. The Wal-Mart is gone, but I still have the comic. It was on a weekend, because we spent the weekends with my dad, and he'd take us to the local Wal-Mart late at night (we liked that, made us feel older), but I remember this being in the afternoon. It was a last minute decision (I can't for the life of me remember the other book), and one I don't regret at all. I read it and was in awe of Mignola's art and how the story went from present to past to back again, and the fact that there was a larger story here, this wasn't merely a good guy beats bad guy thing, there was something here that would span across issues and issues. It was my first real taste of serilized storytelling.

Watchmen TPB

It was in my Grandmother's trailer, where my dad lived most of the time. It was during the summer. I had been lent the book by a friend of my mother's, an actor named Brik (or Brick, can't remember which) Barker, he dug it out of his parents basement one weekend when I went to visit him in Atlanta. He told me to read it, that it would change the wayI think about comics. It took me weeks to get through it all, and most of it I didn't understand, but he was right, I never looked at superheroes the same.

Swamp Thing: Love & Death

It's been awhile since I first read this, but I just reread it about a year ago, and it's as amazing now as it was then. I'd never seen anyone re-imagine a character before I saw Alan Moore do it. In all the years since I've never seen anyone do it as well. I read this first at a job I held years ago, in the span of a day and I remember thinking it had to be the greatest origin ever told in the history of comics.

Preacher: Until the End of the World

I got this at a convention, about four, maybe five years ago I think. I read it in my apartment that night, couldn't put it down. This was likely my first exposure to Garth Ennis, and remains, like Watchmen, a turning point in the way I view comics. As a whole Preacher remains my favorite piece of work in comics, and this remains a prized posession, as battered and beat up as it is.

Uncanny X-Men #201

My dad gave this to me at Christmas one year, probably about eight years ago. It was one of my "Holy Grails", the first appearence of baby Nathan (Cable), and I was excited as all hell when I got it. Of course now it's not really anything, but back then it made me one happy camper. Like so many books before it, it was read inside my grandmothers trailer.

The Castaways

I worked at a pager/cell phone/car stereo shop (also the place I read Swamp Thing) when I got this in the mail. Recommended to me by Alan David Doane via the old CBG forum (this could turn into a whole history lesson, but I won't let it...). I didn't know Alan then, he was just the guy that ran this site I had come across. He seemed passionate and witty, he knew what he was talking about, and damn he loved this book. So, I ordered a copy. This is why I will forever be in Alan's debt. This book opened up an entire new world for me and eventually lead me here. Sure, i knew about indy comics, but nothing like this. This wasn't wannabe superhero books or melodramatic fluff, this was real. I couldn't put it down. I think I read it twice that day, and then again the next.


Okay...so that was only five...but hey, I can't remember everything, and it'd be too easy to do the cop-out and name some recent books. Let's see you come up with ten!!!!

-L